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I have walked into a lot of fitness clubs over the last two decades. The equipment keeps getting better. The programming keeps getting smarter. The aesthetics keep getting sleeker. What I have not found, not once, in any of them, is a deliberate strategy for why members should actually come back. Not for the treadmill. For each other.
That is the diagnosis veteran club operator Herb Lipsman arrived at after four decades managing some of Houston’s most prestigious properties: The Houstonian Hotel, Club and Spa; VillaSport Athletic Club and Spa; Golf Club of Houston; and consulting roles at River Oaks, Lakeside, and Houston Country Clubs. His conclusion is not just a product pitch. It is a read on where an entire industry has structurally underperformed.
“Our industry has done a great job of creating ever-improving facilities and equipment, more creative programs and services. But as an industry we have failed at the most obvious way of attracting more members and keeping them: making each member feel seen, heard, and like they truly matter.”
— Herb Lipsman, Co-Founder, SOZO Clubs
The numbers are starting to validate that critique. Vogue named wellness-focused private member clubs one of the biggest trends of 2026. Midtown Athletic Club’s president has called social wellness the industry’s next major opportunity. Concepts like Othership in Toronto, Remedy Place in New York, and Proper Club in Santa Monica are drawing waitlists without a single squat rack as their marquee amenity.
Category momentum and category execution are two different things. If you operate a club today, the question is not whether to add community programming. The question is whether you actually know how to build it.
Most social wellness concepts entering the market right now are being built by hospitality entrepreneurs or wellness investors. That is not a disqualifier. It does create a specific blind spot: the gap between what a club looks like at opening and what it looks like 18 months later.
SOZO Clubs, the social wellness concept Lipsman is launching with co-founders Gary Henkin and Dan Lynch, is being designed from a different starting point. Lipsman has managed P&Ls, navigated retention crises, and staffed clubs through boom-and-bust cycles. The SOZO model, built around fitness studios, recovery lounges, social settings, curated coworking spaces, and outdoor retreats, is explicitly designed around operational durability, not just design ambition.
On the revenue side, SOZO is positioned between the upper end of upscale multi-purpose athletic clubs and the lower end of traditional country clubs. That is a deliberate move to serve the 30-plus demographic that most fitness concepts have historically underserved. The specific tier structure and build economics remain confidential pre-launch, but the pricing philosophy reflects a core operator conviction: that connection is a premium product when it is delivered with consistency.
For operators evaluating whether to evolve an existing model or build something new, the economic case for social wellness is not speculative anymore. Recovery modalities (sauna, cold plunge, compression, red light) are becoming standard amenity expectations at the premium tier, not differentiators. The clubs still treating them as upsells are falling behind. The clubs treating them as the anchor for a broader longevity and wellbeing ecosystem are capturing a spending category, healthspan-focused consumers in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, that the traditional gym model was never designed to serve.
Social wellness gets operationally hard at the staffing layer. You cannot staff it the way you staff a traditional club.
A front desk employee at a conventional gym checks IDs and answers phone calls. A team member at a social wellness club reads a room, remembers that the member who just walked in lost her husband six months ago, and connects her with three other members who share her interest in early-morning yoga. That is a fundamentally different role.
Lipsman calls what he is looking for “Servant Hearts”: people who are genuinely curious about others and who find meaning in facilitating connection rather than closing transactions. He argues they exist in every market, in every job category. The problem is not scarcity. It is that most hiring processes, built around credentials and certifications, are poorly designed to find them.
“If those in ownership or the C-suite do not exemplify and model this philosophy, there is no chance this sort of culture will form and prevail. It starts at the top.”
— Herb Lipsman, Co-Founder, SOZO Clubs
This has direct implications for coaches and wellness professionals watching this transition. The role of the coach in a social wellness environment is shifting. The session is no longer the product. The relationship is. Coaches who can facilitate group experience, build member cohorts around shared wellness goals, and serve as connective tissue within a community are becoming the highest-leverage operators in any club. Credentials still matter. Relational intelligence is the new floor.
The longevity category (peptides, NAD+ infusions, GLP-1 adjacency, biomarker testing) is moving fast enough that every operator with a recovery lounge is now asking whether to offer it. The answer depends entirely on your regulatory posture, your clinical partnerships, and your willingness to build a compliant infrastructure before you build the marketing.
SOZO is among the operators thinking seriously about longevity programming as an integrated layer rather than an add-on. Lipsman frames it as an educational imperative as much as a revenue opportunity:
“We intend to become community leaders for educating the public, both future members and non-members, on the latest advances in wellness, longevity, and healthspan.”
— Herb Lipsman
That framing matters. Clubs that lead with longevity as a content and community platform, and layer in services from there, tend to build more durable member relationships than clubs that lead with the service catalog.
For operators considering this path, the structural questions to answer first are: Who is the clinical or medical partner? What liability framework governs the services? How are team members trained to present these modalities without making therapeutic claims? These are not roadblocks. They are the infrastructure that separates a sustainable longevity revenue line from a compliance liability.
When you distill 40 years of premium club management into a single operational truth, Lipsman’s is this: the industry has consistently failed at the most obvious driver of retention.
“A member who doesn’t feel seen, heard, or appreciated will be a temporary member.”
— Herb Lipsman
He has heard the line too many times: “I’m your best member. I pay my dues and never come.” Every club has them. The social wellness model, done right, makes that statement impossible, because the value is not housed in equipment or programming schedules. It is housed in relationships that members cannot replicate anywhere else.
SOZO is planning its first location in a Houston suburb, targeting a 2028 opening, with plans to leverage Lipsman’s deep Houston-area network of former colleagues, members, and community leaders as a launch engine. AI-assisted targeting and digital community-building are part of the go-to-market plan, tools that operators of Lipsman’s generation did not have access to and that the next generation of club builders would be foolish to ignore.
The social wellness category is going to get crowded before it gets disciplined. Expect luxury-end concepts with beautiful designs and thin operational depth, the ones that opened in 2025 and 2026, to begin struggling by 2027. The clubs and coaches that survive the hype cycle will be the ones who figured out what they were actually selling and built the internal systems to deliver it consistently.
Here is the honest tradeoff: every dollar you spend on recovery infrastructure is a dollar you are not spending on the staff training, member-facing rituals, and community programming that make the recovery infrastructure feel like more than a hardware purchase. The physical infrastructure is easier to build than the cultural infrastructure. Most new concepts get the sequence backwards.
For operators, the framework is straightforward: assess whether your current programming model creates structured opportunities for members to meet each other. If it does not, start there, before adding recovery bays or longevity panels.
For coaches, the question is whether your identity is built around the session or the relationship. The session is becoming commoditized. The coach who understands recovery modalities, who can speak intelligently about healthspan, and who knows how to facilitate a member community is building something an algorithm cannot replace.
The industry is moving. SOZO is one case study in how an operator is thinking about the transition with genuine operational seriousness. The question for everyone else is straightforward: what is your version of that answer?
FITHIRE
Hiring for the social wellness era is different. Wellness Director, Longevity Program Manager, and Member Experience roles require operators who can read a room, not just run a P&L. FitHire surfaces the talent the next generation of clubs is built on.
How do longevity fitness studios compete with medical spas and telehealth longevity clinics offering the same peptide and recovery services?
Most medical spas and telehealth platforms are built around a transactional visit model. You book, you receive the service, you leave. The fitness studio that wins in this space is not competing on clinical depth, it will not beat a medical office on that dimension. It competes on environment, consistency, and community. Members who come three times a week for breathwork and cold exposure are building a habit anchored to a place and to people. That stickiness does not exist in a clinical setting. The studio’s job is to make the non-clinical experience compelling enough that members prefer the club context even when the clinical service is technically equivalent. That means the room has to feel right, the staff has to know your name, and other members have to become reasons to come back.
What does the longevity studio revenue model look like for a club operating at 10,000 to 15,000 square feet?
The honest answer is that the margin structure varies significantly based on how much of the square footage is equipment-dependent versus experience-dependent. Red light panels, cold plunge infrastructure, and hyperbaric chambers carry real capital cost and maintenance overhead. The higher-margin longevity offerings tend to be programming-based: educational workshops on healthspan, community groups organized around shared wellness goals, curated social experiences that require facilitation more than hardware. Operators building a recovery floor should model both tracks: the equipment-dependent revenue that comes in fast but competes on price, and the programming revenue that builds slower but carries higher retention and lower replacement cost. The SOZO model prices membership at the upper end of upscale athletic clubs and the lower end of country clubs, a positioning that signals the value proposition is not equipment access but member experience.
How do you evaluate whether your staff culture is actually producing member connection or just going through hospitality motions?
The clearest operational test is whether your staff can tell you something specific and personal about at least half the members they interacted with last week. Not their membership tier or their preferred modality, but something from their life. A staff member who can say that a particular member mentioned her son just started college, or that another member is preparing for his first triathlon, is doing the relationship work. A staff member who can tell you that a member comes in Tuesdays and Thursdays and prefers the far cold plunge is doing hospitality. The first profile builds retention. The second does not. The difference matters because the member who feels known is not comparison-shopping your facility against the next red light studio that opens nearby.
Is the social wellness club model viable outside major metro markets?
The social dimension of the model actually performs better in mid-size and suburban markets than in dense urban ones, for a specific reason. In a major metro, a member has fifteen alternatives within a fifteen-minute commute and a different social context every day. In a suburb or mid-size city, a club that becomes genuinely embedded in the community, that knows its members, connects them to each other, and participates in local wellness education, has a geographic and relational moat that is hard to replicate. SOZO is launching in a Houston suburb precisely because that context rewards the depth of member relationship the concept is built on. The longevity modalities travel. The community architecture is harder to import from a coastal concept, which means operators who build it in secondary markets may have more durable positions than they expect.
Erin Nitschke is a Coach360 contributing editor covering club operations, longevity and recovery programming, and the business infrastructure behind high-performing fitness and wellness businesses.
About Erin Nitschke
Dr. Erin Nitschke, NSCA-CPT, NFPT-CPT, ACE Health Coach, ACE-CPT, Fitness Nutrition Specialist, Therapeutic Exercise Specialist, Pn1, FNMS, and DSWI Master Health Coach, is a seasoned college professor in health and human performance. She is a nationally recognized presenter, industry writer for IDEA, NFPT, Fitness Education Online, and Youate.com, and an active member of the ACE Scientific Advisory Panel. With extensive experience in health and exercise science, Erin specializes in holistic, evidence-based approaches to wellness. Her passion lies in empowering individuals to lead healthier, more vibrant lives through personalized coaching. Erin’s philosophy centers on education, accountability, and sustainable behavior change—guiding clients to achieve long-term success in nutrition, fitness, stress management, and overall well-being. To connect with Dr. Nitschke, email her at erinmd03@gmail.com or on Instagram: @nitschkeerin
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